Strathdee’s recognition as one of TIME’s 50 Most Influential People in Health Care is unquestionably well-deserved; as this...
A real-life medical thriller that proves when science, medicine, and perseverance align, “the impossible becomes possible.”
In 2015, infectious disease epidemiologist Strathdee (Global Health Sciences/Univ. of California, San Diego School of Medicine) and her husband, Patterson, a psychologist, were on vacation in Egypt when he was infected with one of the deadliest antibiotic-resistant superbugs on the planet. In a few terrifying days, his health deteriorated to the point where it was uncertain whether modern medicine could help him. As Strathdee writes, “Tom was quickly becoming the poster child for the dystopian future of the post-antibiotic age.” In this fast-paced memoir, the authors describe how Strathdee scoured scientific history and identified an unconventional cure: phage therapy, in which a virus is utilized as a bacterial killer. The catch was that phage therapy hadn’t been used in the United States in nearly a century, and no one knew how to find the right virus, purify it to meet FDA standards, and administer it safely. Miraculously, Strathdee overcame every one of these obstacles with the help of kindhearted and intrepid researchers from around the world. Despite the potential heartbreak that lurks within every chapter, the writing is always infused with humor, hope, and intelligence, and the couple’s remarkable story is grounded in real-life details that bring readers directly into their world: desperate late-night emails to people who might help, on-the-fly Googling of critical care lingo, impromptu dance parties at Tom’s bedside. The book also includes dark, surreal poetic interludes from Patterson’s perspective, providing a glimpse into the patient’s mindset, an interesting contrast to the chronicle of his wife’s relentless effort to save him.
Strathdee’s recognition as one of TIME’s 50 Most Influential People in Health Care is unquestionably well-deserved; as this page-turning book shows, she is a hero whose insight and determination could serve as models to help save many more lives.Pub Date: May 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-41808-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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